Friday, August 21, 2015

Will Card, Kreuger and Nick Hanauer be able to measure it?

Roughly 1.2 million additional robots will be used in U.S. industry by
2025, and robots will perform about 25 percent of the automatable tasks
in manufacturing worldwide in the same timeframe, according to a
frequently cited Boston Consulting Group report
released earlier this year. As the price, size, and operating
complexity of industrial robots plummet, BCG believes manufacturers will
replace 22 percent of human workers with machines.

Even small businesses will (and already do) use them;

... Miraz Manji, founder of TLAC Toronto Printing & Publishing,
a 2D and 3D design, print, and publishing shop in Toronto, Canada, that
creates books for self-published authors. Manji's team uses a mix of
automation, old fashioned design talent, and close attention to craft to
produce small and medium-sized runs of physical books of exceptional
quality -- a niche market until automation increased the number of
artisanal books a small shop could produce.

Still have to have an author, but the actual creation of the physical product is done by TLAC's five employees.

Publishing
provides an interesting historical case study precisely because it was
an industry once occupied by master printers and bookbinders who were
replaced en mass with the arrival of industrial-scale publishing. The
old jobs were all but eliminated.

Creating the mass market books that had to sold in the tens of thousands to pay off for the publishers. Now, that economy of scale is being replaced by runs of a few hundred books.

By taking advantage of the best of human craftsmanship and the most
accessible manufacturing and workflow automation tools, this little
startup is helping redefine its market while pointing to a new way for
savvy small manufacturers to deliver both value and quality. Ray
Kurzweil should be proud.